THE SHERIFF’S cruiser idled in front of the prison’s front gate, waiting for me. No one told me he’d be here, just like no one mentioned they were going to release me in the middle of the night, waking me from a sound sleep as my cellmate blinked dumbly into the guard’s flashlight.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised. After the DA had called with the news, I doubted anything could surprise me again.
They’d found a tape, a video recording of the murder from Hattie herself. Tommy Kinakis had killed her. And Tommy was dead, too. After a few weeks of paperwork, my conviction had been overturned.
I walked under the security lights of the entrance and passed the window at the gate, where an armed guard’s stare contemptuously summed me up. The suit I’d worn from the courthouse to the prison hung limply on my frame. Other than the wallet in my back pocket, I had nothing.
Quietly, I got into the back of the cruiser. The sheriff didn’t turn around or give any sign that acknowledged my presence other than to put the car in gear and pull out of the parking lot. The surrounding hills were black and only a few other headlights lit the freeway as we headed south toward Minneapolis. The time on the dash read 1:07 a.m.
“Where are we going?” I asked after ten miles or so.
It felt like he took another ten before replying.
“You’ll see.”
He was probably dropping me off on some shitty street corner on the north side, maybe in gang territory. It didn’t matter.
I had no idea what I was going to do now. For the last few weeks, the question had buzzed around my head like some inconsequential fly. I ignored it and ate my plastic-smelling lunch, or ran around the track, or fell asleep to the sounds of metal crashes and laughter echoing down the block. It was easier to exist that way, in the future of oblivion I’d planned for myself. But suddenly another future was here, an alternate reality for which I was completely unprepared.
I didn’t have a profession anymore. My teaching license had been revoked while I was still at the Pine Valley jail and even if it hadn’t been, I couldn’t pass a background check at any school in the country.
I didn’t have a wife anymore either. The divorce papers were my first piece of mail after I was transferred up to St. Cloud. I added my signature next to Mary’s, sent the forms back in the pre-stamped envelope, and assumed that was the last contact we’d ever have. Then I got the call from the DA, changing everything, and Mary showed up out of the blue during the next Sunday’s visiting hours.
She looked good—fuller in the cheeks again and a little more color in her lips. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize. It billowed softly in a pattern of delicate green leaves as she walked into the visiting room, not exactly a maternity dress but nothing like the tight-waisted vintage pieces she used to wear. The fabric settled on a slightly more rounded stomach when she sat down. I didn’t let my gaze linger.
Neither of us wanted to speak first. We stared at the empty table between our hands and it was a full minute before Mary broke the silence.
“You’ve heard?”
“Yes.”
Another lull, and then she cut to the heart of the matter.
“I thought it was you. I thought you were going to lie about it like you’d lied about everything else. That’s why I went to see you at the jail—to make sure you were going to confess.”
She spoke to her clasped hands and I noticed her wedding ring was already gone. There was no tan line on her finger.
“But you thought it was me, didn’t you?” she continued. “After we heard about Tommy, I went over our conversation again and realized how I must have sounded. You confessed because you thought it was me.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She nodded and breathed deeply, as if letting go of something she’d been holding too tightly. I changed the topic, asking about Elsa and the farm, and we exchanged some stilted small talk before she stood up to leave.
“When will you be out?” Her glance flickered up and then around the room.
“I don’t know. Soon, I guess.”
“What are you going to do?”
The million-dollar question. I stared at the cracked and potholed pavement racing through the headlights of the sheriff’s car and remembered the curve of Mary’s jaw as she refused to look at me. She’d smelled like wind and sun.
I’d told her I’d figure out a way to pay child support.
She’d looked embarrassed, nodded, and walked away.
I still had a few friends in the city who might let me stay with them while I found a job. As I started thinking about places to work, we drove through the suburbs and into downtown. The skyline, with its golden glow punctuated by Foshay Tower’s delicate spire, was an old friend after a long absence, familiar and yet awkward in its familiarity. The streetlights made my eyes water after so much darkness. It wasn’t until we crossed the Mississippi into St. Paul that I realized most of the bad neighborhoods were behind us and he still hadn’t kicked me to the curb. A few miles farther, when the cruiser turned south on a freeway that led all the way down to Rochester, another possible future presented itself.